There had been nearly six weeks of painful silence before the tragic discovery.

And when the discovery happened, it came just shy of the fifth anniversary of the event which made Charles Lindbergh the most famous person in the world.

Almost exactly five years before the day, which was probably Lindbergh's worst, he experienced his best.

Starting on May 20, 1927, he flew a small airplane nonstop for 33 and a half hours from New York to Paris.

He became the first solo flyer to cross the Atlantic Ocean without stopping, and in doing so,

he achieved a level of fame, which is hard to imagine in today's age of instant global connectivity.

Five years later, he and his wife Anne and their young son Charlie were at their new house

on a 400-acre estate outside Hopewell, New Jersey, when the family's nightmare began.

The Lindbergs bought the estate with the hope of finding privacy from prying eyes of the press and the public,

and in the first two months of 1932, they started spending weekends at their new house, even though it was still under construction.

They spent the rest of their time at the home of Anne's mother about an hour north near the big city of Newark, New Jersey.

On Monday, February 29, 1932, the family had been scheduled to travel from the Hopewell estate

back up to the home of Anne's mother. But a frigid winter storm kept them at Hopewell for two

extra nights. Little Charlie, who was a year and a half old,

had a cold, and the family didn't want to travel while he was sick. On the night of Tuesday,

March 1st, there were six people in the Lindbergh house, Charles, Anne and Charlie, and then the

husband and wife, butlers, and the nanny, Betty Gow.

Betty laid baby Charlie down in his crib in the second floor nursery sometime between 8 and 8.30

p.m. When she returned to check on him at 10 p.m., he was gone.

The kidnapper or kidnappers left behind the first of what turned out to be 13 ransom notes, which the Lindberg family received over the next month.

On the night of April 2nd, 1932, Charles Lindberg drove to a cemetery in the Bronx with Dr. John Condon, a man who had been acting as an intermediary between the kidnappers and the Lindbergs.

Charles Lindbergh handed over $50,000 in cash and gold certificates, which could be spent like normal money.

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